Still really cold here.  I did not ride.  We decorated the house, ate cookies, and sat around.  We watched football.  We worked, a little.  And we blogged :)

Reggie helped with decorating by sitting in every available open box.  He is such a cat.  His look translates as "so what?"

[ Update: It is now raining as well as really cold.  My reindeer have not yet shorted out, so that's a good thing ]

It might be really cold here, for here, but elsewhere it is really really cold; John Hindraker reports from Minneapolis that he's throwing another log on the fire (and goes on to analyze "global cooling"), and in Denver it reached a record -15 below zero today.  (No, Al Gore is not there giving a speech :) 

Philip Greenspun has a nice analysis of extending unemployment benefits.  "An unemployed worker in Michigan needs to move somewhere with a lot of new jobs being created and not too many highly skilled unemployed people competing for those jobs. Certainly he is going to have to move to another state.  Possibly he may need to move to another country.  Handing out 52 weeks of cash instead of 26 weeks seems likely only to delay the inevitable."  This is one of those "teach a man to fish" things, isn't it?  Someone who's making a living assembling cars is in the wrong line of work, and that is never going to change. 

According to CNet, E-commerce sales so far are not a disaster.  That's about the measure of today's economy, anything that's not a disaster is great news.  But it is surprising news, too; online purchases in December are matching those from a year ago.  Probably we have two competing trends, a growth in people purchasing online instead of going into stores counterbalanced by a decrease in overall purchasing.  So be it. 

Related: McKinsey considers Pricing in a Downturn.  They write "getting pricing right is always a challenge in an economic downturn"; but really "getting pricing right is always a challenge", period.  Might be harder now, but it is never easy. 

Today's ZooBorn is Upala the Gorilla.  Man, is he cute. 

Here we have Wine64 - a 64-bit version of Wine, the popular Linux-based Windows emulator.  (I know, I know, WINE is an acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator, but guess what it is anyway; it emulates Windows, not a processor.)  I can remember when this idea of running Windows under Linux was so novel, but now with VMWare and Parallels and so on it is pretty ho hum.  And since everything is Intel-based, it can be pretty fast, too. 

I totally related to Josh Newman's Beginner’s Mind… ("...the sort of perseverance it takes to succeed seems to be a learnable skill. All you have to do is be willing to suck. And suck. And suck. And keep going.")  The thing which was like that for me was managing people.  I sucked at it so hard, and so long, but eventually I got better.  And now I’m only somewhat sucky.  But the amazing thing is that I’ve become a great manager of managers.  I know all the pitfalls, and I am great at telling others how to avoid them :)  I bet Josh is a better golf instructor than Tiger.